Most laptops have a lot of different screws and are hard to disassemble fully down to the motherboard. There are only a few different ones in this laptop, and their use is obvious enough that someone with experience doesn't even need to keep track of where they go. There is primarily only one screw length, with very few of other sizes.

I haven't disassembled any other Dell laptops from around this vintage to compare, but the Inspiron 5555 series is a piece of cake.

I can remember when Dell lead the way for screwless desktops in the 90s. It was a real novelty at the time.

Yesterday I finally started finalizing my period correct Voodoo1 build.
Mostly went alright. Click here for specs.
But the old infamous JST driver started to give me some trouble. After I installed the driver for the V330 it started artifacting if I set anything above 640×480 16bit. At first I thought maybe I misremembered and never tested the card, it came from a questionable place so it might actually be faulty. Tried it in another PC, no faults there.

Decided I should reinstall Windows 95, I planned that anyways, it was the OS came with the drive installed for a different PC, it was just a lucky accident that it booted at all. Booted with a W98 floppy, tried formatting, it gave up around 65%. Repartitioned and tried again, same result. Took the drive out put it into my Win2k utility PC, tried formatting there. It went well until about 63% then slowed down. After 3 hours it went up to 75%, left for the night to see what happens. The morning it was still formatting at 80%. I assume it could work with an around 750-760MB partition.

Today

Vintage market 2023 april.

It wasn't all that good for vintage electronics this time. Some MX440SE here, random modem cards and SCSI controllers there. I picked up a 2GB Quantum hard drive for ~75 cents. It was faulty as expected, but I still wanted to try my luck.

It was much better for games.
I got a Jade Empire with manual in good condition, Prince of Persia (2008) with manual in good condition, Need for Speed: Road Challenge (EU version of High Stakes) decent condition, no manual. All this for 1.5€.

Afternoon I'll continue with the Voodoo build, for the time being with a CF card until I find hard drive.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-02, 07:09:

Most laptops have a lot of different screws and are hard to disassemble fully down to the motherboard. There are only a few different ones in this laptop, and their use is obvious enough that someone with experience doesn't even need to keep track of where they go. There is primarily only one screw length, with very few of other sizes.

I haven't disassembled any other Dell laptops from around this vintage to compare, but the Inspiron 5555 series is a piece of cake.

I can remember when Dell lead the way for screwless desktops in the 90s. It was a real novelty at the time.

Mid 2000s Dells are some of the easiest to work on computers ever. Like Some of them even the motherboard is on a tray and can be pulled by removing a single screw.

Their laptops during that time frame were also very easy to tear down. I can tear my XPS M1710 down and put it back together in like 30 minutes (very quick for a desktop replacement laptop from that time frame)

laptops always seem prohibitively small, delicate and fiddly to open up and work on, and one time changing a screen showed me the truth of that (though it went ok)

yet i have seen some confidently take them apart, change out parts and get everything back up and running perfectly. practice i guess, and a good manual / memory / set of pics while taking apart!

Here are some photos of two different processors that were available for the Inspiron 5555: the A10-8700P (Carrizo) and the A8-7410 (Carrizo-L). Despite both being released around the same time, there are a lot of differences, including the die size and the date printed on them (2015 vs 2013). Although branded as a lower power core, these both run at 15W in the Inspiron 5555. To clarify the core technology, the 8700P is actually based on Excavator, while the 7410 is Puma+. They also have slightly different supported CPU features. And while the integrated Radeon R5 is clocked slower, it is configured with 1GB of memory in the Inspiron, whereas the R6 has 512MB. This amount of not configurable in the BIOS.

Running some basic benchmarks show that the A10 is slightly faster in CPU and graphics, but the difference was negligible when I compared in the Unigen benchmark, with there only being a dip of 1 or 2 frames in most scenes.

I was kind of surprised at how close these two processors performed. While the specifications might suggest a much larger boost for the A10, this was not noticable from testing. Temperature and average performance was very similar.

Another annoyance was the integrated Radeon. The R6 is 64-bit instead of 128-bit. So while it has a 3x more shader cores available to it, performance is very similar to the R5. Maybe this chip is more impressive at games with a higher TDP and 128-bit Radeon R6. But for the Inspiron, it feels like it's largely marketing.

In what has started some debates on twitter and youtube I finished trying to install windows ME on my Dell 466i. (I was doing it because of a poll, and because I have too much free time?!)

Small video on it:

https://youtu.be/HHkx6q9IQOI

Actually I did two things last night:

• I finally managed to get my AMD 5x86-P75 running at 150MHz on a 50MHz FSB to clock down enough without re-jumpering so that speed sensitive games would run. For that I copied the HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE from my Win98 installation on my other machine over to my Dos 6.2 to use the slowdown utility without crashes. But I think you can also download a zip with those files from the slowdown homepage here https://bretjohnson.us. The best settings I have found so far are:
  Copy code to clipboard

  1slowdown /UseInt70 /MHz486:25 <program>
  

  . There might be better settings. But these should get you started. I have tried Test Drive 3 so far and it works like a charm and without any hangs or crashes 😀 I generally tested it with a slowdown down to 4MHz which worked without hangs. I am leaving that here a bit more detailed so I find it again some day and maybe somebody else benefits from this 😉
• A while ago I put my Baby AT SS7 board into a modern tower with USB3 on the front. I thought I should try and get it to work with the USB1.1 header an the MoBo. So I bought a USB 3 to 2 conversion cable and then some jumper cables that enabled me to connect 2.55mm pins to the 2mm pins on the MoBo. Since the jumper cables finally arrived I plugged everything together. And after firing that up and plugging in a USB stick Windows 98 instantly asked me to provide some mass storage drivers *win*

it was the borderline between modern and retro/vintage today as mostly 15 year old tech involved. completing a build i started over a year ago

asrock wolfdale1333 motherboard with an E8600 cpu (i though it was e8200, what a nice surprise!). An HD 4850 video card. 4gb ram. 640gb hdd and W7

it was nice to get it done and have the parts doing what they are supposed to do

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-16, 04:17:

I actually just had my virus scanner alert me to the existence of Virus:DOS\Form on an old set of original DOS 6.0 installation disks from 1993.
One thing that's pretty interesting is one IBM branded 3.5 disk with a label on it that says "For IBM Use Only" with a couple check boxes that say "IBM Confidential" or "IBM Internal"... amusingly, neither are checked off and the description written on the disk is "Games". Sure enough, there are some old games on it from 1991. 🤣

You can use my mini antivirus to clean Form virus on your disks, you don't even need to boot from clean floppy disk just run VCHECK.EXE it can disable those viruses even if they are active. but you need to do this on DOS

Masaw wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:12:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-16, 04:17:

I actually just had my virus scanner alert me to the existence of Virus:DOS\Form on an old set of original DOS 6.0 installation disks from 1993.
One thing that's pretty interesting is one IBM branded 3.5 disk with a label on it that says "For IBM Use Only" with a couple check boxes that say "IBM Confidential" or "IBM Internal"... amusingly, neither are checked off and the description written on the disk is "Games". Sure enough, there are some old games on it from 1991. 🤣

You can use my mini antivirus to clean Form virus on your disks, you don't even need to boot from clean floppy disk just run VCHECK.EXE it can disable those viruses even if they are active. but you need to do this on DOS

Windows Security (formerly Defender) in Windows 10 actually seemed to clean them off of the disks after a bit of messing around. After I had it do some things it no longer detected them.

If anyone wonders why virus scanners are huge and complex these days, this is a good example. It is still able to detect a virus that was created in 1990 (2 years before most home computers were running any version of Windows) on a squeaky old floppy disk being read by a USB floppy drive.

Finished setting up my pentium 2 Voodoo 2 sli setup.

Im using a monster 2 8 meg card and a voodoo 2 12 meg card which isnt ideal but its all i have for now.

Law212 wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:33:

Finished setting up my pentium 2 Voodoo 2 sli setup. […]
Show full quote

Finished setting up my pentium 2 Voodoo 2 sli setup.

Im using a monster 2 8 meg card and a voodoo 2 12 meg card which isnt ideal but its all i have for now.

That SLI bridge PCB is pretty neat. I can't help but feel that one of the real 3dfx logos should have been used on it though. Where did you get it?

Sweet, where do I get one of those extra fast motherboards with speed holes though?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:37:

Law212 wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:33:

Finished setting up my pentium 2 Voodoo 2 sli setup. […]
Show full quote

Finished setting up my pentium 2 Voodoo 2 sli setup.

Im using a monster 2 8 meg card and a voodoo 2 12 meg card which isnt ideal but its all i have for now.

That SLI bridge PCB is pretty neat. I can't help but feel that one of the real 3dfx logos should have been used on it though. Where did you get it?

I was watching someone on youtube set up their sli voodoo 2 setup and they had one and linked to the seller so i bought two of them from the link one was for two brackets apart and one was for one bracket apart.

If i can find the link again ill edit it into the post

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:41:

Sweet, where do I get one of those extra fast motherboards with speed holes though?

Spoiler

An auto racing thing, speed holes, cutting holes in sheet components to reduce weight, which improves acceleration, braking, handling (less lateral momentum to counter)

Where I get all my computer hardware. The thrift store.

Masaw wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:12:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-16, 04:17:

I actually just had my virus scanner alert me to the existence of Virus:DOS\Form on an old set of original DOS 6.0 installation disks from 1993.
One thing that's pretty interesting is one IBM branded 3.5 disk with a label on it that says "For IBM Use Only" with a couple check boxes that say "IBM Confidential" or "IBM Internal"... amusingly, neither are checked off and the description written on the disk is "Games". Sure enough, there are some old games on it from 1991. 🤣

You can use my mini antivirus to clean Form virus on your disks, you don't even need to boot from clean floppy disk just run VCHECK.EXE it can disable those viruses even if they are active. but you need to do this on DOS

Aren't there some viruses that can infect a computer just by inserting a floppy disk, without even opening up any files?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-06, 19:38:

Masaw wrote on 2023-04-06, 18:12:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-16, 04:17:

I actually just had my virus scanner alert me to the existence of Virus:DOS\Form on an old set of original DOS 6.0 installation disks from 1993.
One thing that's pretty interesting is one IBM branded 3.5 disk with a label on it that says "For IBM Use Only" with a couple check boxes that say "IBM Confidential" or "IBM Internal"... amusingly, neither are checked off and the description written on the disk is "Games". Sure enough, there are some old games on it from 1991. 🤣

You can use my mini antivirus to clean Form virus on your disks, you don't even need to boot from clean floppy disk just run VCHECK.EXE it can disable those viruses even if they are active. but you need to do this on DOS

Aren't there some viruses that can infect a computer just by inserting a floppy disk, without even opening up any files?

Not sure. Maybe?

If there are, they were probably mitigated at some point in the last 25-30 years.

FORM apparently only exists to point it's finger at you and say "Haha!" because it doesn't actually do any damage other than to replicate itself, and it only does that when you boot from an infected floppy.

Oh, as for my retro activity, I tested a big lot of floppies that I picked up that were VERY interesting. Will probably post about them soon. 😁

I also finally got my XP test machine running after having to relearn several of the aggravating quirks of XP's installation process. I have only installed XP a few times in the past 7+ years. Pro tips: Just suck it up and burn a fresh CD from a reliable ISO, don't bother with using a flash drive unless you have a good reason to and will genuinely benefit from the speed increase over time. Also, disconnect any unneeded drives or card readers from the PC unless you want to see that your system drive is inexplicably Drive (E:), even though XP setup refers to it as C:... necessitating yet another reinstall just to be sure everything works properly.

One thing that blew my mind was how ridiculously CPU bound most systems from the early 2000s were in benchmarks. I ran 3dMark2001SE and scored a whopping 54,000 with a rather meager Quadro FX 3500, which is just a 7900GS. The thing that must have really sent the score through was the totally overpowered i5 2500K running at 4.2Ghz with a nice set of 1866Mhz DDR3 on an MSI P67A board. I couldn't believe the frame rates in the tests... some were consistently between 600 and 999fps.

That card is only an upper mid range card from 2-3 years after the benchmark came out and yet it can score almost 4 times the score of high end cards from the time the benchmark was created (I remember 14,000 being a good solid score with a high end Geforce 4 Ti) seems a bit crazy, and I remember how fast things were moving back then, but we were still massively CPU bound apparently.

EDIT: By comparison... my current PC with a 5800X3D and a 3060Ti just scored 80,000. I'm sure there are some serious driver optimization issues involved though because the first high detail game test was clearly much slower than on the XP system above, so that would certainly skew the results.

Took and bought myself a Gateway 2000 GP6-400 Pentium II 400MHz 512MB RAM - Windows 98 SE computer to slowly start rebuilding my retro pc collection. I just love the tall case that this thing has!

While testing 'Croc Legend of the Gobbos' after install, I noticed obnoxious MIDI notes randomly playing. I consulted the readme file, and the problem is described - bird calls, various weather effects, and so on might not play properly unless AWE32/AWE64 MIDI is selected in the control panel. I had the X2GS set as default, and the problem was solved after making the change.

I tested, in summary:

Sound Blaster Live! MIDI Synth A & B [OK]
Vortex 2 MIDI [BROKE, you'll hear the random notes as soon as the first level starts]
DreamBlaster X2GS attached to Vortex 2 Wavetable header [BROKE, you'll hear the random notes as soon as the first level starts]
Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth [BROKE, problems begin when dropping down into the first 'secret' cave]

So, I have two games which need the AWE64: Croc and Dark Forces (for whatever reason this game locks up if I try to use the X2GS, but in other builds it has worked before; no matter the AWE64 sounds just fine.)

I guess having multiple soundcards in a retro machine really is helpful to keep all bases covered, even putting aside EAX and A3D2. I made a note on the shortcut for the future.